Tuesday, August 22, 2006

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the FBI's call for help from the security community. My question then was, "How do we get in touch with the FBI to offer our help?"

It turns out not to be very difficult. The same day, I wrote the following email to my local FBI field office:Good morning. I've been reading news articles for the past few days about FBI Cybercrime Unit Chief Daniel Larkin's speech at the Blackhat conference last week. In it, he called for assistance from the information security community. I admit that I'm not really sure exactly what sort of help is required, but I'd like to contact someone in your office in order to offer my assistance.

I've been doing IT and Cybersecurity for about 15 years, and my specialties include analyzing hacker techniques, security incident reponse and security monitoring/intrusion detection. I run my own security consulting company, which you can read about on my website (www.vorant.com).

I'd like you to know that if the need arises, I'm here to help.

To my surprise, I got an email from one of the Special Agents assigned to the cybercrime team at the local field office. We met this morning at the local coffee shop.

It turns out that the number one thing he needs is a network of people on the front line that can identify potentially-significant threats, ideally before they can become truly dangerous. New hacking techniques, novel scams and the like. As NSM/IDS people, we're likely to pick up on these sorts of things before they are otherwise widely-known, and this could provide law enforcement with a valuable heads-up.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you hand over your monitoring data to the FBI or any other agency at the slightest provocation. There are significant privacy and organizational policy concerns to be aware of. Unless you're actually reporting a crime, be careful about what you reveal. In most cases, however, there's no problem with sharing information about the technique or the possible impact of successful attack.

If you'd like to try hooking up with your local FBI field office, check out this list of field offices. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.